Educational attainment, the years a person spends within the education system, generates interest among scientists because statistical analysis shows that there is a relationship between that value and different aspects of life including income when adults, state of health and even life expectancy. Geneticists analyze trends that can explain variations within a population by exploring […]
The reward pathway is a group of brain structures connected to each other that are key in the processes of motivation (desire, motivation, craving), associative learning (operant reinforcement and positive conditioning) and in positive emotions, particularly those in which pleasure has a fundamental component such as joy, euphoria and ecstasy. The reward is an attractive […]
Little children with autism have more lead and less zinc and manganese than children of the same age without autism. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications and has been carried out by a team from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) […]
Each of the Voyager probes, two unmanned spacecrafts launched in 1977, has a gold-plated audio-visual disc, a recording that aims to introduce us to a possible alien and to show the diversity of living beings and cultures that planet Earth has. Carl Sagan said that «The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only […]
While I was at school it was almost a dogma that you’d not get a neuron more than those you were born with. Later, at university we learned that actually there was a region in the human brain, namely the hippocampus (key region for memory formation) where there was indeed adult neurogenesis, that is, formation […]
The most effective interventions in people with autism are based on a personal work by specialized professionals and these therapies, when well designed and well done, achieve a constant improvement in different areas such as social communication, the presence of stereotypes and other atypical behaviors characteristic of autism. However, person-to-person therapies are by their very […]
Author: Fernando Giraldez is currently Professor of Physiology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, and has a broad experience in teaching and research in Neuroscience and Developmental Biology. The view that music, maths and language are related is quite widespread. We know that they share common abstract properties and their associated skills and abilities […]
In 1928, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience, wrote that the brains of adult humans never make new neurons. “Once development was ended,” he proclaimed, “the founts of growth and regeneration … dried up irrevocably. In the adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable. Everything must die, nothing […]
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is one of those must go places for any brain enthusiast. The collection beautifully represents the history of modern medicine, including a repository of skulls used in phrenological studies, broken cranial bones à la Phineas Gage, diseased coronal cuts, American civil war surgical memorabilia, and a great little gem: a […]
Contrary to what was thought some years ago, the adult central nervous system is capable of generating new neurons, some of which are integrated into functional circuits and seem to be essential for processes such as memory and learning. The question of why these new neurons are not capable of replacing those lost in neurodegenerative […]